Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/705

Rh All republican constitutions set forth the great truth that every human being is endowed with certain inalienable rights — such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — and as a consequence, a right to the use of all those means necessary to secure these grand results.

1st. — A citizen can not be said to have a right to life, who may be deprived of it for the violation of laws to which she has never consented — who is denied the right of trial by a jury of her peers — who has no voice in the election of judges who are to decide her fate.

2d. — A citizen can not be said to have a right to liberty, when the custody of her person belongs to another; when she has no civil or political rights — no right even to the wages she earns; when she can make no contracts — neither buy nor sell, sue or be sued — and yet can be taxed without representation.

3d. — A citizen can not be said to have a right to happiness, when denied the wight to person, property, children, and home; when the code of laws under which she is compelled to live is far more unjust and tyrannical than that which our fathers repudiated at the mouth of the cannon nearly one century ago.

Now, we would ask on what principle of republicanism, justice, or common humanity, a minority of the people of this Republic have monopolized to themselves all the rights of the whole? Where, under our Declaration of Independence, does the white Saxon man get his power to deprive all women and negroes of their inalienable rights?

The mothers of the Revolution bravely shared all dangers, persecutions, and death; and their daughters now claim an equal share in all the glories and triumphs of your success, Shall they stand before a body of American legislators and ask in vain for their right of suffrage — their right of property — their right to the wages they earn — their right to their children and their homes — their sacred right to personal liberty — to a trial by a jury of their peers?

In view of these high considerations, we demand, then, that you shall, by your future legislation, secure to women all those rights and privileges and immunities which in equity belong to every citizen of a republic.

And we demand that whenever you shall remodel the Constitution of the State in which you live, the word "male" shall be expurgated, and that henceforth you shall legislate for all citizens. There can be no privileged classes in a truly democratic government.

The above memorial was extensively circulated and sent to the Legislature of every State in the nation, but, owing to the John Brown raid and the general unrest and forebodings of the people on the eve of our civil war, it commanded but little attention.